Heems

Himanshu “Heems” Suri announces a surprise new project, LAFANDAR. After a six-year hiatus from releasing solo material, Heems reemerged late last year with his On The Radar freestyle, setting the stage for his forthcoming project LAFANDAR, out February 16th via his own Veena Sounds label in partnership with Nas’s Mass Appeal India. The project is a collaboration with Indian-American producer Lapgan, who released his History project as the inaugural body of work on Heems’ new Veena label.

The project finds Heems mangling Lapgan’s cinematic South Asian samples with all the internal rhyme and laugh-out-loud wit fans remember from his old tapes and work with Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys. LAFANDAR’s title is an old-country insult for a vagabond, a wanderer, a loomer, a lurker, an urban dilettante, and especially in Heems’ case, a flaneur. Heems casts the sprawling enclaves of Queens, New York as outsider hip-hops natural home, with new subsects dialects, references, and threats around every corner.

In conjunction with the project’s announcement, Heems releases “Accent,” its poignant lead single that was developed from a verse that he wrote in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and first debuted in 2017 on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as part of the Swet Shop Boys with Riz Ahmed. Composed of twelve tracks, LAFANDAR consists of noteworthy peers from Heems’ past and present such as Kool Keith, Saul Williams, Open Mike Eagle, Sir Michael Rocks of The Cool Kids, Your Old Droog, Quelle Chris, Jersey’s Fatboi Sharif, and fellow artists of South Asian descent, Sid Sriram and Abhi the Nomad.

Suri is also formally launching his new magazine and brand, Veena. An ode to the collision of his South Asian heritage and New York roots, Veena is dedicated to and named after his mother, and explores the implementation of self-care through Heems’ passions – fashion, flows, and food. In celebration of its launch, Veena is releasing a product offering encompassing all three of its core tenets — Sounds, Wears and Naturals — including physical editions of both 2010 Das Racist mixtapes Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down Man, which are being made available on vinyl for the first time. Veena is also releasing two tees designed by Himanshu Suri and Peter Chung (Supreme, Polo) and 100% organic cold-pressed virgin coconut oil made in India.

Speaking on the connection between his music and his new endeavor with Veena, Heems says, “My world was one of graffiti and golgappas, skateboards and saris, music and Mughals, and so on. This is what my music sounds like.” Now he invites you to experience the rest of the world he is building.